Due to work and my main music project, I haven’t had a lot of time yet to fully dive into this one. Still I could already dedicate some hours to the CyDrums and, so far, I have to admit I haven’t been making much progress.
And this is not so much due to the interface - it takes time to get acquainted with every machine - than the synthesis method: I’m a total noob in wavetable and find it quite daunting.
I really like some of the demos I found (by Vaag in particular), so I know this machine can produce the kind of sound I like, but I’ve been unable to reproduce that sound so far.
So, would anybody have a couple of quick, possibly easy tips to help me get started with wavetable synthesis?
The only difference to normal subtractive synthesis is that the Oscillators have more waveforms that you can work with, if you just switch through all available wavetables that´s pretty much it. It gets more interesting and less static if you modulate the wavetable´s playing position with LFO´s, Envelopes, Velocity, keytrack and so on.
OK, after a bit more time spent on the CyDrums, I would say, it boils down to knowing your wavetables very well…
But there are loads of them, and many are quite complex
(to quote SonicWare : “64 original wavetables, each comprising up to 256 single-cycle waveforms”)
It will probably take a while to know my way around the wavetable list, but in the meantime I think I’ll take the back seat and just enjoy randomly building sounds
So, the CyDrums still looks daunting to me, and I haven’t had a lot of time yet to fully dive into it. Still, I’m quite sure this is the kind of instrument I like. If its UI can be a bit strange, it also has particular features that are quite strong. They are just not the ones an Elektron user is used to.
I have found a series of tutorial videos (well, just 2 for the moment) that helped me getting acquainted with many shortcuts/features:
I’d like to have a small machine i can hold in 2 hands on the couch. But you have to use the abcd knobs which seems uncomfortable while holding the device. And there’s a cable coming out the back because i wouldn’t want to use headphones.
I guess it’s not really the device i’m looking for then, right?
This I cannot tell, my friend. I guess you should have a close look at the specifications.
The phone jack being at the bottom of the machine would talk against couch use (although that’s how I use it, but the jack of my HD-25 is angled). You have to consider this is a quite chunky piece to hold in your hands.
On how I’m using it, well I don’t know yet. I would say it’s a deep instrument, and there are probably many ways to use it because it’s highly tweakable.
Lately, for example, I have been trying to use it in a melodic way, setting a different note on each pad, all of them with the same sound, and experimenting with the aftertouch on filters, or just volume, to have the sound of various tracks go from silent to loud according to how much pressure I apply to the pads. All the tracks have different notes, different sequence length, different time signatures.
You can set the pads’ sensitivity according to how much you want to press, set a pressure threshold for the modulation to start, define how long it takes for a sound to come back to initial after you stop pressing. That’s how tweakable it is, for example.
I have the T-8. But it also has knobs on top of the unit and doesn’t feel nice to hold in both hands while tweaking.
Good to know. I’d really like a gameboy sized device that can be controlled with a few buttons.
I have nanoloop on the Nintendo DS but of course it’s not comparable to the CyDrums. The amount of sound design possibilities in this unit is very cool.
Yeah, it’s bigger. Although, as you suspect, much deeper. And a good combination of depth/usability, I would say. In spite of all the criticism.
What shouldn’t be overlooked, also, is how much “performative” (is that a word?) it is for its size, with pads supporting both velocity and aftertouch as modulation sources.
But I’m going to shut up now because, although my first impressions are very positive, I feel I still need time to make a definite opinion on the CyDrums myself.
I haven’t gotten the cydrums yet but as a T-8 enjoyer, the lofi xt is more fun to actually play and mess around with in your hands. The T-8 is unbeatably quick to get a serviceable set of drums kicking on a track (especially if you sequence it externally) because of the minimal sound shaping and selection time but the sonicware form factor is much more fun and expressive in general, plus better visual feedback and pads.
I get a lot of joy from the drum synthesis on my digitone ii and would expect cydrums to be something like a happy medium between that and the T-8, with enough depth to do nearly any interesting thing you can think of but not as easy to lose intention/focus as digitone ii, and like with a digibox you won’t need to worry about needing an external sequencer to unlock the full capability like the T-8 does. I always treat the airas like they are each an individual instrument in a band and play them accordingly, but the sonicware flow is a lot closer to elektron for either live or automated manipulation of the sequence and sound.
Using those built-in speakers for a kick drum or bass sound is a complete joke though. I just play with headphones or plug into my monitor setup and it doesn’t bother me. I even brought my lofi xt camping last week with some rechargeable batteries and headphones and had some fun sitting on the beach, so I don’t know what device could really beat it for portable power.
XNB just posted a 1 hour 40 minutes deep dive tutorial for CyDrums. I enjoy his videos so much that even when I don’t ever plan to own something, sometimes I still watch his guides
That’s dangerous with a company like sonic ware because those videos have a reasonable chance of highlighting some incredibly cool feature that sonic ware themselves underpublicized that your other synths don’t have
I got one and tried it out for the first time last night. As a LoFi XT owner, I was really surprised at how different it actually is in the exact same form factor, especially in terms of the modulation options. I also have ELZ_1 Play and the oscillator/patch controls are totally different from that as well. Super ultra deep in a way that’s gonna take a long time to intuitively dial in but there’s a lot of crazy power for both drums and synth sounds and I was able to get a feel for how to work with it in about an hour. You can parameter lock a LOT of stuff and there’s a lot of interesting modulation targets. Not truly polyphonic per track but you can do a lot with the envelopes to build slow-strum type chords and its non-drum synthesizer capabilities are good enough that you could for sure use it as a standalone groovebox for a lot of music types.
Feels a little bit buggy still in terms of playing pads with a pattern going but I’m almost overwhelmed by the power here. Once I actually RTFM and start being able to set the various mod parameters in a more deliberate way I expect to be able to do some pretty crazy things, but I think ELZ_1 Play, digitone ii, and microfreak all do a better job guiding you naturally to good, easy to work with sounds and this one is basically meant to guide you to crazy glitchy sounds but can do an awful lot more once you get the workflows and options understood. I think it was a good buy but it might be awhile before I know it well enough to be more than a stimming toy for me, it kind of reminds me of this “random weird sound” toy I had when I was young that I couldn’t get enough of lol.
